Randall Kenan was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., but grew up, raised by his grandparents (and a small battalion of aunts) in the small rural community of Chinquapin, graduating from East Duplin High School before heading to Chapel Hill.

So we had to ask, how is his writing different than it would have been, had he spent his childhood in the Big Apple.

Kenan chuckled. (He chuckles a lot, in conversation.) “I was just giving a speech about that last week. I think that all good writing is based on having a sense of place. We Southerners just take the rap because we talk about it so much.

“The thing is, I have a culture, a history, a set of people that nobody else has written about,” he added. “It’s this well that keeps on flowing for me; I don’t think I’ll ever run out of material.”

He paused. “I hated Duplin County when I was growing up. I love it now.”

Kenan, who’s drawn praise from the likes of Robert Coles, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Gloria Naylor, will be the next guest on Prologue, the weekly book club sponsored by the StarNews and public radio station WHQR. He’ll field readers’ questions beginning at 7 p.m. Monday (Feb. 9) in the WHQR gallery, upstairs at 254 N. Front St. Admission is free; refreshments will be served.

There’ll be plenty to talk about. Kenan drew respectful reviews for his debut novel “A Visitation of Spirits” (1989), but his career really took off with his 1992 short story collection “Let the Dead Bury the Dead,” which was a New York Times “Notable” book of the year and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

His big book to date has been “Walking on Water” (1999), a non-fiction survey of the African-American experience in North America that’s part oral history, part travelogue, part chronicle and part memoir.

For Prologue, however, we’ll be focusing on his most recent book, “The Fire This Time” (2007), a volume of essays. The title is a play on “The Fire Next Time,” a now-classic essay collection from the black American novelist James Baldwin. Kenan even frames one of his essays as a letter to his nephew, just as Baldwin did.

“He wrote so much,” said Kenan, who also wrote a young adult biography of Baldwin. “He addressed race and racial issues in ways that had not been done before — and in ways that still speak to the problems we face today.”

As an example he cited passages from “The Cross of Redemption,” a selection of Baldwin’s uncollected works, which Kenan edited and for which he wrote an introduction.

“Way back in 1964, Baldwin said that having a black president wouldn’t make a whole lot of difference,” Kenan said. “So much else in the culture would still have to change.”

Not that Kenan himself is a pessimist. “My nephew is in such a different place,” than Baldwin’s, he said. “It’s not just a black-and-white culture any more. The largest non-white ethnic group in the country is now Hispanic. You have Asians, you have Middle Easterners — it’s a multi-ethnic society.

“A lot of barriers have disappeared. There’s now a large black middle class. We still have problems, but things are so much better than they were in the Sixties.”

Kenan hasn’t published anything new in a while, but he’s still busy. On the way, he says, are “If I Had Two Wings,” a new short story collection, and “There’s a Man Going Round Taking Names,” a large novel spanning from Chapel Hill to New York City and covering several decades.

“It’s about two friends, one black, one white, both from privileged families in Orange County,” he said. “They wind up being abducted by this band of anarchists, more like Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters than Symbionese Liberation Army. Years later, as grown men, they run into some of these characters in the city.”

About This Blog

This is an emporium for all things literary: occasional book reviews, local book news, items about authors (mostly from the Cape Fear area but occasional visitors) and miscellaneous rants.

The usual author is Ben Steelman, feature writer and book columnist for the Star-News. He’s that shaggy, slightly smelly character you spot lurking in the back aisles of your local bookstore. Physically, he has more than a passing resemblance to Ignatius J. Reilly, hero of John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” — some observers have noted other parallels as well.